Friday, March 20, 2009

Green tea and lung cancer

Lung cancer is a particularly nasty form of the disease because it can spread very quickly to other organs in the body. This spreading—called metastasis—happens when cancer cells break away from the main tumor, latch onto another organ, and begin reproducing until they have formed another tumor, after which the process starts all over again.

Specifically, green tea polyphenols were shown to trigger molecular changes in tumor cells that made them "stickier" and therefore less able to detach from the main tumor and float away into the blood stream. The polyphenols also reduced the cancer cells' motility.

If you can make sense of this sentence

In particular we found upregulation of several genes that modulate actin remodeling and cell migration, including lamin A/C.

then why not dive into the full paper (PDF) ... and let me know what it means, would you?